An iterative heuristic for the single machine dynamic total completion time scheduling problem

The authors address the problem of scheduling a single machine to minimize the total completion time in the face of dynamic job arrivals. Since the problem is strongly NP-hard, considerable research has been devoted to examining one-pass heuristic procedures for this problem. In this paper the authors present an iterative improvement heuristic which operates by modifying the problem data in a manner that allows one-pass heuristics to generate improved solutions. Computational experiments show that the procedure obtains significant improvements over a variety of one-pass heuristics in modest CPU times.